No Silver Lining For U.S. Cloud Providers

A court ruling on Friday over search warrants means continued trouble for U.S. cloud providers eager to build their businesses abroad.

In his ruling, U.S. Magistrate Judge James Francis found that big ISPs — including name brands Microsoft and Google — must comply with valid warrants to turn over customer information, including emails, even if that material resides in data centers outside the U.S., according to several reports.

Microsoft challenged such a warrant a few months back and this ruling was the response.

See the post for details but the bottom line is that you can’t rely on the loyalty of a cloud provider to its customers. U.S. cloud providers or non-U.S. cloud providers. When push comes to shove, you are going to find cloud providers siding with their local governments.

My suggestion is that you handle critical data security tasks yourself and off of any cloud provider.

That’s not a foolproof solution but otherwise you may as well cc: the NSA with your data.

BTW, I would not trust privacy or due process assurances from a government that admits it would target its own citizens for execution.

You?

This entry was posted
on Monday, April 28th, 2014 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, Security.
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